Cinnamon Choice Ubuntu or Linux Mint?

[Benchrest]

I have been playing with Cinnamon on Linux Mint 12 in parallel w/ my production 11.04. I have decided Cinnamon is pretty good for me. However should I install Ubuntu 12.04 and cinnamon via PPA or wait a bit and install the LinuxMint equivalent of 12.04 with Cinnamon. I am leaning towards Ubuntu 12.04 with the PPA. It seems like maintenance and documentation might be better and more timely. Any opinions?

[Frogs Hair]

I am not familiar with Mint's documentation. I think Cinnamon would probably run best on its native operating system . From what I have found you can install Cinnamon from .deb package on 11.10 . I am guessing that you may be able to do that on 12.04 in time if not already. To get the latest updates a PPA may work best. I don't know if installing the .deb would enable updates for Cinnamon on Ubuntu.

[kc1di]

I'm using cinnamon right now on Ubuntu 12.04 and it seems to work well. I installed it via ppa with no trouble.

[kio_http]

I've never used gnome or cinnamon for anything more than an hour. So I might not be giving the best advice. But since mint is so heavily based on Ubuntu and even uses its servers, it should hardly make a difference. Mint just tweaks regular Ubuntu with different packages (mainly graphical ones) and settings.

[forrestcupp]

I used Cinnamon in 11.10 from the PPA for a while. I didn't really like it, but it seemed to work fine. I'm sure if they have a PPA for 12.04, it won't have much trouble. Just remember that 12.04 is still beta, so you could have trouble, anyway. I think I probably wouldn't do anything crazy with 12.04 until the final is released.

[anontheanon]

Cinnamon is vastly superior to unity or Gnome3. Its the best GTK3 desktop environment in existence right now. Also, their choice to use MATE instead of "fallback" gets kudos from me. Its MUCH more like Gnome2 (An exact copy really) than 'fallback mode' and I always like Mints flavor of Gnome2 with the Mint menu which is more like a more efficient version of the KDE style menu with one bar instead of 2....Mate on Mint is better than Gnome2 on Ubuntu due to Mint menu and the single panel which leaves room for a dock, and better than fallback mode, and Cinnamon is better than Unity.....I know more work went into Unity than into Cinnamon, but Unity assumes that people want this radical new interface that is more like a cell phone, and in my experience they dont.

So yeah, the combo of MATE + Cinnamon is vastly superior.

You 'can' install both on Ubuntu, but I would start from Xubuntu instead. If you install on Ubuntu Main then you have to intall Gnome3 AND Unity as dependencies, which means a minimum of 4 desktop environments, and things are more likely to break.


There are two advantages to using ubuntu though, including Xubuntu. 1 is that you can upgrade more easily than in Mint. The other is that we are approaching a new long term stable release, which gives a new incentive. LTS with backports should be good for a while.

Mint Debian is getting better and better though, with Cinnamon and Mate as well. I like rolling releases.

[neu5eeCh]

You 'can' install both on Ubuntu, but I would start from Xubuntu instead. If you install on Ubuntu Main then you have to intall Gnome3 AND Unity as dependencies, which means a minimum of 4 desktop environments, and things are more likely to break.

But Gnome Shell & Unity are both built on the same base, unlike Xubuntu. My thought is that you will run into file manager conflicts when installing Cinnamon on top of Xubuntu. The default for XFCE is Thunar, and Nautilus for Gnome. Unless I'm mistaken, my experience is that once you install both file managers, you will have to do some tweaking in order to resolve the conflicts. It can be done, but it's not an issue if you don't use Xubuntu. Then again, it's all a learning experience.

[illopos]

How is the resource usage by Cinnamon compared to that of Unity and Xubuntu?

[Version Dependency]

How is the resource usage by Cinnamon compared to that of Unity and Xubuntu?

Both Cinnamon and Unity are built on Gnome 3 and will use more resources than Xubuntu (built on XFCE). If you need a lighter desktop, XFCE is the way to go. If you are running really old hardware, LXDE is an even lighter option (but it lacks some of the user-friendlyness of XFCE).

[neu5eeCh]

I want to like Cinnamon more than the rest, but at this point I continue to prefer XFCE. There are some nice touches in XFCE that are missing in Cinnamon: The ability to shade windows with the scroll button; the ability to maximize windows without borders; the ability to use compiz and emerald if desired; and, in general, a more easily customized DE.